Blogs

5 IT performance management lessons to learn from 2015

By Raj Patel, Sr. Director of Corporate and Field Marketing

Our team prides itself on being composed of people with focused and extensive expertise when it comes to IT infrastructure performance management. Our engineers, executives, sales and services teams are well versed in speaking to and delivering solutions to many of the largest enterprises in the business. And, because of the collaborative dialogue we have with our customers and partners, we’re fortunate to have a deep understanding of what it takes to solve the most complex (and often confounding) challenges in enterprise IT infrastructure today. Our Virtual Instruments blog is just one way we share those insights with the wider enterprise IT community, and the following five lessons shared on our blog in the last year are important points that will continue to grow in relevance in 2016 and beyond:

Infrastructure performance means looking beyond utilization metrics

This post analyzed problems with solely relying on utilization metrics to make infrastructure decisions, specifically in terms of over-provisioning and inefficient/ineffective purchasing. When companies don’t understand the true requirements to run their infrastructures efficiently, they spend more than is really required to handle workloads. Additionally, when utilization is the only concern, teams buy for peak capacity, which leads to wasted resources during off-peak hours. By using a holistic approach to IT infrastructure performance analytics, enterprises are solving problems faster and making accurately informed decisions with authoritative data from the entire open-systems stack.

IT teams cut costs after they conduct critical infrastructure audits

A critical infrastructure audit (CIA) is a service that helps teams understand their IT infrastructures before they make any decisions on additional investments. After conducting an audit of an enterprise’s critical infrastructure, companies save substantially by identifying optimal performance-tuning strategies that make their infrastructures operate more efficiently over time—no matter what changes occur—without requiring massive investments. IT decisions, like any other, are made best when all possible information is taken into account. CIAs give teams the deep insights they need to make accurately informed adjustments and purchases, without slowing operations in the process.

Building a baseball team and improving IT infrastructure performance have more in common than you may think

The statistical revolution in Major League Baseball has been well documented. The lessons learned from using deeper data to produce actionable analytics is helping teams win championships. Leveraging a similar analytical approach is also helping IT teams improve digital infrastructure performance. The innovators behind baseball’s increased reliance on analytics simply wanted to understand the game better just as IT teams need a better understanding of their application infrastructures and workload delivery. As IT departments continue to adopt a holistic approach to monitoring and measuring the impact and ripple effect of each and every IO, they are making better decisions and driving optimal performance.

The ‘inevitability of the cloud’ makes performance management a top priority for 2016

Virtual Instruments CEO John Thompson sat down with the hosts of theCUBE at EMC World last year to discuss the company, IT and industry developments. Most poignantly, Thompson discussed the “inevitably” of the cloud. We’ve seen the transition to the cloud come in stages. However, as Thompson said, a full shift isn’t too far out once the right pieces fall into place. Right now, the remaining obstacle is a lack of confidence in the cloud as a host for mission-critical workloads. When performance becomes a priority for vendors on top of availability baselines, IT teams will move to the cloud with greater confidence. Many, including some of our executives, think 2016 will be the year we see more support for these lingering cloud migrations.

Reactive problem-solving no longer has a place in enterprise IT

Businesses rely on their IT departments for everything these days. Whenever a problem arises, it can take hours, days or weeks to solve—setting back entire departments in the process. But the days of reactive problem-solving must end. Businesses need expertly enabled and proactive IT departments that can identify issues as they start to emerge, and that can resolve these issues before they become performance-impacting events causing widespread damage. Three keys goals are achieved when teams are always able to understand where emergent issues are developing in real-time: reducing performance degradations and related events, optimizing application infrastructure for the best workload delivery, and enabling perpetually agile, high-performance IT that supports and drives optimal business outcomes.

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